ABSTRACT
This chapter explores social practices of justification as part of how authors construct and transform social institutions. It has three parts: a conceptual development of justification; an extended case study of this approach to examine how Islamic judges in Indonesia justify decisions; and an examination of two influential theorizations of pluralism against the background of the first two sections. Public justification thus draws on a set of socially-accepted normative resources, with respect to a particular set of hearers, including the speaker or writer's own internal interlocutors, and then adds new content to those normative resources. To the extent that any spoken or written decision is already crafted with an audience in mind, and hence with the likely response of that hearer as part of the very reasoning that led to the act of speaking, public justification often is all that we are able to observe.
